Slab Mag
Phantom Narratives of the Built Environment

Unfairly assuming that Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry represent the top four architects of our time, I decided to pit their fame against each other in a highly questionable Google Trends test:

Volume of Google search-queries for each architect’s full name in all regions throughout the year 2006.

Frank (in green) comes out on top overtaking Zaha (in red) in February whilst loosing favour towards November. Rem (light blue) bumbles along quite steadily but Daniel (yellow) dissapears off Google’s radar in July, only to reappear in August.

Here are the results for the period 2004 to 2006:

Here Zaha enjoys a huge surge of popularity in Jan 2004 as she wins the illustrious Pritzker Prize. The only rush of interest for Daniel arrives for a short moment in June 2004 around the opening of the Jewish Museum in Copenhagen.

The Big Four are often refered to as “star-architects”, so it’s easy to forget just how utterly insignificant they are when compared to someone of true significance: Britney Spears (dark blue). Add her to the equation, and architectural discourse flatlines:

Location: None